In recent years, personal computers and other data processing devices have been used in an environment allowing access to a plurality of printers. For example, a system that has a plurality of data processing devices connected to a plurality of printers via a network may be set up so that each of the plurality of data processing devices can access each of the printers. With this system, virtual devices corresponding to the printers are registered in the data processing device so that the user can specify which of the printers is the output destination.
Further, a plurality of virtual devices may be registered in a data processing device, even when the data processing device uses only a single printer as the output destination. For example, when a plurality of different print settings is used frequently, it is possible to register a plurality of virtual devices for a single printer such that each virtual device has different default settings. If the user wishes to use a variety of print settings for a single printer in this way, the user can perform printing with the desired print settings simply by selecting one of the plurality of virtual devices having the desired print settings as the default settings. Therefore, the user need not modify the printer settings for each print operation regarding whether to use the duplex print function, whether to use the color print function, and which of a plurality of paper cassettes to use, thereby eliminating the troublesome operations involved in modifying print settings.
However, if the number of virtual devices registered in a single data processing device becomes excessive under these circumstances, the user must search for a virtual device having a desired function from among the plurality of virtual devices when the user wishes to use the virtual device having the desired function. This can require the user to spend more time looking for the desired virtual device. Further, in order to determine whether the selected virtual device has the desired function, the user must confirm that the function is available after selecting the virtual device. Should the selected virtual device not possess the desired function, the user must select another virtual device and try again. In some cases the user may have to repeat the troublesome operations of selection several times.
To resolve this problem, technologies such as that disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-152507 have been proposed for generating a plurality of functional device names by combining a printer name with a plurality of function names representing functions possessed by the printer and for displaying the generated functional device names. With this technology, the user can determine what functions the printer possesses simply by browsing through the displayed functional device names.